With the advent of mobile communications, more and more devices are becoming integrated with the world wide web. Everything from a simple cellular phone to more complex mobile devices such as laptops, electronic books, tablets, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and even automobiles are striving to maintain a constant connection to the internet. As a result of all this interconnectivity, websites and other online application providers have been showing an ever increasing interest in providing services to these mobile clients.
For mobile network operators (MNOs) that own the network and access to the mobile subscriber, onboarding all of these third party service providers and applications has not proved to be easy. A multitude of issues and problems may arise when managing large numbers of applications attempting to access the telecom network. One such issue involves payment, charging, credit/debit actions, as well as other billing and revenue management functions.
In many cases, providing centralized management and integration of all these charging and billing functions can be a quite complex and tedious task for a network operator, especially when it involves large numbers of applications. By way of example, some applications may wish to integrate their charging into the monthly bill of a subscriber, while others may be based on prepaid services, requiring credit control actions on the fly. Moreover, in some cases, the charging and payment functions can be invoked for actions initiated by a mobile subscriber, while in other cases, the charging action may originate with the application providing the service to the subscriber. What is needed is a way to integrate all of these potential use cases and to provide centralized management and control over the payment, charging and other revenue management in a telecom network environment.